This week has been very hectic. I have had to set up 4 different servers for different sites. The first two were a hassle getting ffmpeg and ImageMagick installed and working on. The servers we are using come with RedHat EL4, which limits us in terms of package version available through yum. I ended up having to download a fair number of packages and building them from source. Once I finally had all of the dependencies worked out, everything went easy, but building from source has always been a pain.

Nursery Water Canada finally went live today. We were held up due to a large number of translation issues with the French site. They reside at nurserywater.ca and fr.nurserywater.ca. They went up without a hitch.

The biggest hassle this week has been transitioning one website to a new server. The site has 89 Gb of data, and transferring that over is taking a lot of time. Beyond that, the site was using legacy apache server side includes inside php files. I wasn’t able to get the new server to interpret the ssi’s in php files, so I ended up having to replace all of them with php include statements. In the long run, this is a better solution, but it just feels like time wasted.

I also have a Joomla project that is due next Friday that I was just able to start. I was supposed to have static templates at the beginning of the week, but my front-end developer, Daniel Andrews, kept getting pulled away by other projects.  I was able to prep a large portion of the content structure in Joomla though, so I was able to get the homepage content done in about 2 hours today. The difficult part of the project is just the VirtueMart store they want. I have to get VirtueMart and jSeblod to play nice with each other so that I can get the content I need for each product and display it the way we want. The design calls for details tabs that require specific layouts.

Overall, I’m somewhat disappointed with Joomla. The content organization is great, but the way their system outputs is horrifying. Everything is nested in tables needlessly. I find it odd that it is even the default output, since the joomla.org site doesn’t even use it. I’ve had to go in and hack most of the output pieces to remove all of the extraneous tables. For the most part, I just have it detect if I have set a certain body class, and if I have, just output the data using the jSeblod template provided. That works best in almost all cases.

Since coming back from my vacation, I’ve been hard at work on a site redesign for AmericasMart. I’ve been working with Daniel Andrews to build out new templates and integrate them into the Process Wire CMS they use. We went live with their new design today, and it looks pretty nice (www.americasmart.com). They integrate with a fair number of pieces, so we built a system to output and cache templates as well.

The next step is to move them in to Joomla, so that they will be using an open source CMS. From there the plan is to build out a more interactive site with a media center and many other pieces.

I just found out that the Coca-Cola project I worked on is live on their website.

http://video.thecoca-colacompany.com/presscenter/avcenter/

This is very exciting, because it is the first project I’ve worked on for a global company.

I start full-time at What’s Up Interactive today. I’m looking forward to it, and have a few projects to work on. I’ll be finishing up with the Nursery Water US site. Then I’ll have the US Spanish site for Nursery Water. Also, I’ll continue working on a server issue with Aubrey Daniels Blog.

Starting full-time means I’ve finished up at Georgia Tech. I ended up with one A and two B’s for my final semester. That gives me a final GPA of 3.31 and Honors status. I kept the HOPE Scholarship the whole time as well, which means I owe a thank you to everyone who plays the Georgia Lottery for paying my way through college.

The Coca-Cola project is going into the testing phase and revisions. Hopefully it will be live on the Coca-Cola site in late November or early December.

Additionally, I am now learning about Joomla for What’s Up Interactive. They have several Joomla projects coming up and need to get as many people up to speed on component and module development as possible. I helped Daniel work out some issues for a smaller site that will go live in the next week or two in preparation for some much larger development.

So good news and bad news. I managed to get a new contracting job working for What’s Up Interactive. It’s an exciting opportunity, because I’ll be working on something for Coca-Cola. Looks like it will be an interesting place, and I’ll get to work with two designers, one of them being Daniel Andrews, that I know from Southern Web Group.

The bad news is that I’m not going to be working for Southern Web Group any more. I met with Drew, and we decided that he really needs someone that can devote more time and has more interest in his clients. It was nice working for him for the last year.

I have finally begun my search for full-time employment after graduation. So far I’ve found a few jobs I’m interested in, and I’m planning on sending resumes out this coming week. I’ll be looking for employment in January, so hopefully the companies are willing to wait a few months for me to finish up school.

I believe I have a fair shot at getting a job, or a least a leg up on most graduates. I already have 4 years of experience in Web Development working as a member of a team and managing smaller teams. I hope my portfolio will speak for itself, showing that I can handle projects of varying scope. Additionally, I’ve clearly demonstrated I can pick up where someone has left off and manage complicated systems, as well as upgrade and expand them.

Hopefully I’ll start to hear back soon after sending off my resume.